The Sum of His Parts
by AngelDormais
Summary: While investigating strange seismic readings deep within the tunnels beneath New York City, a natural disaster brings calamity upon the Hamato clan. Or perhaps there is nothing natural about it. There is certainly nothing natural about that which rises in its aftermath. Character death; except not so merciful.
1. Chapter 1

_a/n: welcome, friends, to my first attempt at a multi-chapter fic in ages. this prologue is meant to serve as a teaser to what will ideally come in forward-completed chapters later on. as one of my more ambitious fics in both content and length, i'm nervous to put this one out there, but i hope that you enjoy the ride!_

 _lastly, thanks to my good friends and longtime fandom buddies ash and pi for soundboarding as well as beta reading. without them, i would have rejected this fic as too outlandish to ever see the light of day._

 _-angel_

* * *

Leonardo peers down the tunnel's mouth.

"Something isn't right."

"No shit, Fearless," Raph says from his perch atop a hill of rubble. He's just as tense as Leo is; maybe more. "If it was, we wouldn't be out on this little field trip."

"That's not what I mean."

Leo doesn't expand further than that, nor do his brothers press him, but the whole atmosphere seems to tighten. Michelangelo swerves to his immediate older brother, resting his hands on his nunchucks.

"You getting anything, Don?"

"Negative," Donatello replies from the ground. He hits a few keys on the display of his portable seismograph, then sighs and closes the lid. Snapping the clasps shut, he hauls it up by the handle attached to its side. "Let's keep moving."

They follow, Leo and Mikey detaching from the walls and Raph sliding down from his pile of debris. Mikey picks up his pace to keep even with Don.

"I'm kinda with Leo on this one," he says nervously. "This place gives me the heebie-jeebies. Besides, we've been out here for hours! Can't we call it a day?"

"I don't recall mentioning any 'heebie-jeebies'," Leo comments dryly from the rear.

Raph throws up his arms. "What's gotten into you two? It's just a freakin' tunnel!"

"It is _not_ just a tunnel." Don's tone is clipped as he hurries along, carefully sidestepping a fissure in the ground. "I told you guys-there's been some seriously weird activity going on down here the past few weeks. It's getting closer and closer to the lair, and as far as I can tell, there's nothing stopping it from reaching us."

Michelangelo rolls his eyes. "Should I be more weirded out that one day you just thought, 'hey, let's monitor the planet for earthquakes near the lair!', or that you actually found some and decided we should all go _towards_ them?"

"Installing underground sensors in the area was my idea," Leo admits, still squinting at the walls like they're about to attack. "But I was thinking more along the lines of motion sensors."

Don shrugs. "I was bored."

Raph grunts, following Leo's gaze. "Now that you mention it… these tunnels don't look natural. You think someone's been diggin' the area up?"

"Would that even register on Donnie's size-o-meter?" asks Mikey.

"Seismometer." Donatello frowns, rubbing his chin. "And… maybe. Calibrating the oscillators was tricky for such small models; I wanted a better output than -"

"Layman's terms, Don," Leo interrupts sharply.

"I've been measuring vibrations in the area, not necessarily seismic activity. Theoretically speaking, construction on a big enough scale _could_ have tipped the sensors off."

"Big? How big are we talkin'?" Raph demands.

Don scratches the back of his neck. "Um… 'secret underground facility' big?"

"I think it's time to pull back and regroup," Leo says. "We don't know what we're dealing with yet."

"Aw come on, Leo, don't be such a-"

Before Raph can finish, a shrill alarm pierces through the air. They wince, Mikey covering his ears, as Donatello curses and unhooks a small digital scanner from his kit.

"Geez, Donnie, give a turtle a warning-" He freezes, realizing that Don has just turned several shades paler. "Don?"

"We've got movement," he breathes, eyes wide. "And it's coming this way. Guys, we need to move." He looks up, to each of them, his expression turning fierce just as an ominous rumbling begins echoing through the tunnel walls. " _Now!_ "

The earth suddenly lurches beneath their feet, hard enough to send them all off-balance, and Don's seismometer kit clatters to the floor as it's thrown from his grip. Raphael is the first to recover; he yanks at Mikey's arm and gives Leo a rough shove, piloting them back the way they came.

"You heard him! Let's get the hell outta here!"

Only years spent training as a single, well-oiled machine keeps them from tripping over one another as they careen backwards through the tunnel like madmen, trying to outrun the echoes of groaning rock behind them. They're wordless and breathless for what feels like hours; shoving at each other when one slows, grabbing one another's arms to counterbalance whenever the ground rolls underfoot. At a sharp bend, the ground gives an especially violent heave and Don's feet skid. He recovers, scrabbling at the earth and launching forward again at top speed, but Mike's already looking behind him to make sure he hasn't fallen behind. Whatever else he sees cuts a startled yell from him.

"Guys, _faster!_ "

"Go, go!" Don cries, already aware of the problem.

The words are barely out of his mouth before the inner wall collapses in front of him, sliding into the bend in an avalanche of dirt and cracked stone. Mikey yelps again and dives for safety, disappearing in a curtain of raining stone. He can't even see Leo-

Donatello realizes in a rush that he won't make it. He lurches to a halt, heart plunging nauseatingly into his stomach. A roar sounds just behind him, and Don reaches out to snag a blur of red and green, stopping his brother from bludgeoning his way through an active tumble of rocks the size of his shell; Raph curses as his arm snaps against Don's grip.

"Raph, no!" Don's voice is eerily level despite its volume, and he wonders if his brother will be so quick to process their predicament. "Don't-"

"Let go of me! Don, we gotta get _out_!"

He opens his mouth to respond, but a cry of pain from one of his brothers up ahead draws his head sharply up like a beacon. As he roughly hauls Raph towards the stable wall, it dawns on him that they're all in real trouble - the debris is rapidly stacking to the ceiling. There's no way of getting to the others like this. They're as good as separated.

Donatello's brain is firing on all cylinders. A crack opens up between his toes, and he shifts rapidly out of the way, stomach leaping into his throat. Raph wrenches from his grasp with a roar, both sai flying from his belt to attack the wall of rubble with vigor.

Helplessly, Don looks behind them, to the rain of dust and crackling stone, to the ominous rumble still approaching from the darkness. A split in the ground is crawling towards them at a furious pace, swallowing shadows like a ravenous beast.

He doesn't know what to do. All of his improvisations in the past - those moments of brilliant insight that have pulled him and his brothers from the jaws of death, and he's stuck here miles underground in the dark, powerless against one single act of nature.

So he does the only thing he can think of.

"Leo! Mikey! _Keep going!_ "

" _No!_ " Comes the immediate, muffled shrill from the other side, and that is definitely Mikey; Don doesn't give himself the time to wonder if that means Leo's the one who cried out earlier, or if their fearless leader is just too busy attacking the other side of the wall to comment.

Don backs closer to the landslide, carefully avoiding Raph's warpath. He feels sick. He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want Raph to die, he doesn't want Leo or Mikey to die, but cold reality is holding strong and he's just desperate for _someone_ to get out of here alive. "Don't be stupid! You can still get to safety!"

" _You_ don't be stupid!"

"He's right," Leo's voice interrupts, the acoustics all wobbled and blurred. "You go, Mikey! Get Casey, get Leatherhead, get -"

"No! I'm not leaving any of you! Raph, _tell them!_ "

"Just hang on," Raph seethes. There's a meaty _crack_ and a sharp intake of breath as he snatches a hand back from the stone. His sai clatters to the ground. Relentlessly, he hacks at the wall with the remaining one, his pace refusing to slow. "I can get us all outta here. I can -"

Something shifts again in the air; seems to swallow all of the oxygen, Leo's muffled reply, everything left. Raph freezes, his eyes lifting to the ceiling. The beam from his mounted flashlight illuminates a flurry of stale dust, swirling like stars; beyond that, a fissure angrily opening in the ceiling, staring down at them like a slitted mouth with jagged, stony teeth.

A sound of crackling bone overhead brings the world to a pinpoint. Another muffled noise of metal clanging sharply to the dirt.

"No," comes Leo's voice.

Then the mouth screams open, and the darkness plunges down.


	2. Chapter 2

_a/n: thank you all for your generous and encouraging response! aside from these first couple chapters i can't promise a consistent or speedy update schedule for this one, but i have a soft deadline for its completion. it warms to see the interest, and as long as it exists, the show will go on._

* * *

Steven's alarm drills sharply into his skull like a hot cattle prod. With a groan, he rolls over in his bed, reaching dumbly for his phone in the dark. His glasses stick uncomfortably to his skin - it's so damn hot in these insulated rooms, and he always falls asleep with them on - so he pulls them off with a grunt as he locates the phone and shines it into his face.

It's not his alarm; even _he_ doesn't get up at four in the morning. Sitting up, Steven squints at the screen until the rest of it comes into focus. An e-mail from his boss marked urgent. God, she can't leave him alone even on the weekend? Grouchily, Steven slides his glasses back on and swings his feet over the side of the mattress, already standing even as he opens the message up.

"You can't be serious," he grouses after reading, tossing his phone onto the covers. " _Another_ one?"

As he casts about the floor for his clothes, the device chirps at him again. This time Steven ignores it until he wrestles a white shirt over his head; once he's halfway dressed, he picks it up and glances at the caller ID before bringing it to his ear.

"Morning, Elaine."

"Try 'ass crack of night', Dr. Hollins," she replies sleepily. "Since you didn't snap my head off, I'm guessing you got the notice, too?"

Steven chuckles and begins hunting for his tie. "Yeah. They want us up there 'supervising' again while they clear the cave-in. God knows why."

"Come on, even you have to be bored of staring at those samples," his assistant teases, sounding a bit more awake. "Fun! Excitement! Another step closer to total infrastructure collapse!"

Groaning, Steven shoves his phone between his jaw and shoulder to work on his tie.

"I can't believe it. That's the second time this month already. How much money did the boss pour into this facility, again?"

"Probably a lot, if we're so understaffed she's sending the lab coat squad to help with clean-up. Think we're at least getting paid overtime?"

"Good one," Steven says. "At the rate we're making progress, I think the manual labor _is_ our paycheck this month."

"Ouch." Elaine sounds amused. "Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to bail. Gotta know how much coffee to bring."

"You're a star, Ms. Barras. I'll meet you out there in a few."

Elaine bids him goodbye before hanging up with a click, and Steven musses a hand through his dark hair with a slow exhale. As much as it pains him to admit it, she hadn't been wrong.

The research team had been beating their heads against a brick wall for months over the DNA samples that had seemed so exciting when presented to them a year ago. In fact, this entire facility had been privately contracted and constructed as a means of bringing them closer to the areas where the samples had been collected, in hopes of making similar discoveries. They had entire teams digging up and scouring the caves for life on a daily basis. Steven didn't think it was entirely practical - or legal, for that matter - but he didn't exactly have the kind of boss you say "no" to.

And aside from the too-hot rooms, the facility isn't too bad. It had coffee and breakrooms, and lots of shiny equipment he's never even seen elsewhere in the science community. The technology alone is well worth putting up with the eccentricities of his superiors. Now if only his team could find something in those DNA sequences to convince them it's all worth keeping.

"We'll have our breakthrough," he assures the mirror.

His sweaty, freckled reflection doesn't seem as confident.

* * *

Only once he's standing in the aftermath does it dawn on Steven how bad this cave-in was.

Half of him can't believe he slept through it - from the loud chatter of the hard-helmeted workers, who bunk closer to the edges of the facility, he learns that it had been loud enough to startle a third of the whole complex awake. One of them waves a glowing traffic baton in his direction, and he quickly steps out of the way to make room for a forklift rumbling past. As it comes to a stop, a swarm of workers unload armfuls of stone into a container mounted on the forks.

Most of the work is being done by hand, to avoid exacerbating the fragile integrity of the cave - closer to a cavern, now. Wooden support beams have been erected around the walls to bear some of the weight, and as Steven picks his way down the tunnel, he comes to the slow realization that clean-up efforts have been going for a while now. He finds it odd. Why wait so long to call his team in?

"Dr. Hollins," someone calls.

Steven hikes over a three-foot hill of dirt to see Elaine waiting at a collapsed bend in the tunnel up ahead. He waves to her and pulls into a light jog to catch up, but as soon as he gets close enough to get a look at her expression, he slows again. Something is wrong.

"Ms. Barras?" He ventures.

She all but shoves a thermos of coffee at him. A dark braid falls from her bun, and she blows it away from her face, looking up at him gravely.

"We found something," she whispers, her dark skin taking on a paler shade. Steven's brow furrows.

"We what?"

"This way."

Elaine leads him down the bend. They find themselves nearly glued to the outer wall, most of the inner one having taken the brunt of the collapse, and aside from a generous cleave in the debris on the far end of the turn, most of it looks uncleared. Another question rises to Steven's throat, but before he can get it out, an abrupt smell of something awful chokes it away.

Steven isn't proud of it, but it's a stench he's become intimately familiar with over the course of his work. He swallows in fear.

Blood.

He barely has time to react; they step into the cleared portion of the bend, and Steven sees the rest of his team gathered in a tight half- circle against a wall of rubble, murmuring rapidly to one another and sticking out like sore thumbs with their white coats in a sea of orange vests and hard hats. As they approach, one of his colleagues - a young, doe-eyed man by the name of Richard Mayers - looks up, his eyes bright with thrilled anxiety.

"There you are, Steve!"

His greeting causes a few others to glance up as well, but most of the scientists remain hypervigilant, hawking over an indistinguishable lump at their feet. They bring to mind a pack of wolves gathered around the carcass of a stricken prey, waiting for someone to tell them they can eat. Something awful and ecstatic begins roiling in Steven's stomach.

"What is it? What did we find?" he exhales, excitedly.

Rick motions him over with one hand, moving out of the way. "See for yourself."

His heart pounding, Steven picks his way around a slab of rock and slides into the spot. When he looks down at the subject of everyone's interest, a sharp intake of breath spikes in his chest, and a dull clang sounds from the floor as his thermos hits the ground and rolls.

At their feet lies the mangled body of some humanoid reptile. It seems terrapin in nature, but what appears to be its shell is a collapsed bowl of meat and bone and dust. Still buried halfway in a pile of rubble, it's plain to see that the creature is dead - its left arm is nearly separated from the elbow down, the plastron marked and caved in like slabs of bloody, beige-colored stone. A strip of blood-soaked cloth sticks to the side of its cracked skull; leather gear, ripped and equally swollen with moisture, lies in tatters around its body.

"Holy shit," Steven says.

"This poor bastard." Richard's voice sounds behind him, low and regretful. It disrupts the atmosphere of brewing horror enough for Steven to pull away and glance at him. "Look at it. It's wearing _clothes_. It's bipedal. This thing was living. Not just alive, _living._ "

Marilyn Roys, a middle-aged woman with thick blond curls, finally breaks her gaze away from the body to look around at everyone. Her lip worries between pearl-white teeth. "You don't think this is…"

Steven tracks. "One of the sample subjects?"

"Jesus Christ." Oscar Wilde rubs a hand over his scruff over and over. "Look at it. Has the boss even contacted anyone? What are we supposed to do with it?"

"It's _dead_ ," Marilyn points out sharply.

"Obviously!"

"I called. She's going to meet us out here as soon as she can," Elaine interrupts smoothly, sliding into the proceedings. It relieves Steven to see that she's regained most of her composure; she's one of the more level headed members of the team. "She got tied up in taking care of other business."

"And it's more important than _this?_ " Rick asks incredulously.

As the others bicker, Steven's gaze returns to the poor creature half-buried beneath an unforgiving pile of stones. This is it, he realizes. This is what they were waiting for - hell, this is what this entire _facility_ was banking on. But he doesn't think even their boss could have predicted the body of one of their DNA donors itself showing up on their doorstep, if that's really what this thing is. This is the breakthrough of a lifetime.

So why does looking at this miserable, ruined body, wearing tatters on its skin and intelligence in its dulled eyes, wring such a sense of loss from between Steven's ribs?

Despite his better judgment, he finds himself stepping closer to the corpse, ignoring the reprimanding cry from someone to leave the body alone until their supervisor arrives. He leans in close, overwhelmed by the stench of decay, to study the look of artificial peace in its slackened face.

On a whim, he lifts two fingers and presses them into the grimy, leathery skin of the creature's neck. What he feels makes him jolt in surprise, and he has to re-locate it to make sure he'd gotten it right.

A pulse; thready and weak, but bouncing defiantly beneath his fingers.

"We need EMS on-site, _now_ ," he barks over the surprised exclamations of his colleagues. "It's still alive."


	3. Chapter 3

The turtle codes before the EMS unit even arrives on scene.

It's Steven who notices, with his fingers jabbed up into the thing's carotid, and another shouting match amongst the group brings them to the conclusion that there's not a whole lot any of them can do. The entire research team has medical background, but only Richard and Marilyn have any experience in trauma response - even fewer know what kind of CPR they should be expected to perform on a being with solid plates for a chest and a mouth shape that will just send rescue breaths out the sides. Whether it's even viable for something so grievously broken already. Before any of them can even decide where to begin, the creature slips away from them as quickly as they'd found it.

That ends up being the most logical event of the night.

It starts getting weird when a few seconds later, the turtle drags in a gasp and starts breathing again all on its own.

That medical marvel sets Dr. Mayers off for whatever reason, and he shoves his way in next to Steven, his brown eyes wide and wild. Without hesitation, Rick furiously begins tearing shreds from his lab coat and jamming them into whatever wounds seem to be bleeding the most.

His initiative stirs the rest of the team to action. Four minutes after Steven's initial announcement, every accessible inch of the turtle is getting swathed in cloth and gauze and cotton and whatever other innovations they can find in their pockets. A brave group of workers, too familiar with blue collar work to be afraid of a dying beast, make their way in and begin strategically clearing the rubble from around its crumpled form.

Steven attempts to help as best he can with one hand - he applies pressure when and where asked, peels off the tatter of cloth stuck to the creature's head and flicks it away, giving Oscar the chance to tape down a handful of cotton balls to a gash in its skull. But his focus largely remains on the thready, irregular pulse tapping a warpath beneath his touch.

When the improvised van and gurney finally arrives, they all know that moving the turtle will almost certainly kill it. But they have no other options. So they gather round, scientists and workers alike, and carefully distribute its weight between them as they make the transfer. More than one of them grunt at the unexpected weight of the creature; among them is not Rick, who had been tasked with keeping the arm stable and preventing it from completing its separation from the rest of the body.

Miraculously, the thing continues its parade of defiance against death as they roll it onto the gurney, strap it down, and load it into the back of the van. Rick and Mari load into it too, tersely firing off EMT vernacular at one another until the closing doors cut them off.

The van careens away in a wobbly, uneven roll that makes Steven think there's no possible way its passenger will survive the trip. Then again, it had literally revived itself right in front of their eyes. Anything is possible.

He turns to face the rest of the team - in various states of dishevelment, missing parts of clothes and smeared with dirt and blood like extras in some B-movie slasher. Elaine blows a braid from her face and looks at him expectantly, clearly expecting marching orders.

Just as he opens his mouth to give them, the clomping noise of stone beneath boots signals the arrival of someone far more qualified.

"What's going on here?" her voice nearly shrieks, and if Steven had been any less familiar to working with her as his superior, he might have thought she was in the process of losing her mind. But this is just how their boss is; no volume button, as loud and unrestrained as she is brilliant. "Where's the beastie?!"

Steven turns to the woman, needing to crane his neck to even begin a hope of making eye contact. He nudges his glasses up with his bicep and clears his throat; behind him, he can sense his team cringing and silently thanking the higher powers that this isn't their job.

"Dr. Finn," he greets her cordially. "We had to make a call. There's been an… unforeseen development."

"Oh," says Abigail Finn, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. " _Do_ tell."

* * *

Dr. Abigail Finn. Brilliant biologist and engineer, a medical science degree and a dissertation of evolution under her belt that would make Darwin blush. A certified genius, once a figurehead stealthily poised to shake the scientific world with a breakout discovery… until her own ambition orchestrated her fall from grace, and shortly thereafter, her disappearance into obscurity without leaving behind so much as a tremor in the community she'd dedicated her life to.

She isn't the first. In fact, she was simply one in a long line of scientists to have suffered similar fates. If nothing else, it drew eyes away from her predecessor - nobody had talked about Baxter Stockman's disappearance anymore once Abigail Finn's trainwreck of a Bigfoot hunt hit the tube.

It's a cruel, unforgiving world, the scientific one.

No one had been more disappointed in that broadcast than Steven. He'd always admired Dr. Finn for going against the grain of what many scientists seemed to be: she was towering, powerful, with a body just as intimidating as her mind. She took control of her career and called the shots instead of meekly accepting the pecking order of a world that valued charisma over brains. Steven is willing to bet that she'd never suffered bullying as a child, the way he and many of their kind did - or if she had, she only used it to propel her determination. Her fall from grace had seemed so abrupt.

When he'd been handpicked by a mysterious benefactor to join a highly clandestine and specialized research group, he'd had his doubts about leaving his unexciting position at the hospital three blocks down from his apartment. Who wouldn't have been? But scientific minds were relentlessly curious ones, and after investigating the offer and learning who was behind it, Steven had become enraptured.

Working for the disgraced Abigail Finn, who had raged and bellowed with hot steel in her eyes that she had been sabotaged. Joining an elite group for glory; for the opportunity to discover creatures they had only seen grotesquely portrayed in fairytale books. Ultimately, to clear Dr. Finn's name and mechanize her return to the community that had stepped so cleanly over her disgraced form. There was an almost romantic element to the idea.

There's something much different than romance in Dr. Finn's eyes when he tells her of the creature: it's sharp, bright and glinting in the dimness of the tunnel, and her lips pull into a grimace that tries not to be a smile. Her gaze passes over him and to the rest of the team, calculating.

"You all know what this means, don't you?" she asks, almost sweetly.

Oscar Wilde, a pudgy man in his thirties with no gray hair but the beginnings of a bald spot, clears his throat.

"Yes, Dr. Finn. We'll run the DNA tests as soon as we get back. Even if the, uh… the subject doesn't survive, at least we'll -"

"Oh, he'll survive," Finn says sharply. Her grimace twisting into a sneer, she jabs a finger in Oscar's direction, which he flinches back from as though it had struck him between the eyes. "You'll make sure of it."

"But - Doctor. The injuries were severe. I'm not sure..."

"You're my best people. I have the utmost faith in you," she continues, her voice once again rosy with honey. Her massive arm lowers and she glances at her watch. "Now stop flapping your gums and get a move on! I'll tell one of the workers to lend you a truck."

And with that, she stomps away, kicking through rubble and stone as her voice raises in the direction of a swirling orange light in the distance. Steven releases a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Rubbing a wrist over his forehead, he turns to the rest of his team.

Something about that exchange… had bothered him. He's just not sure what.

"Shake the lead off, team," he says grimly. "You heard the boss-lady. He survives tonight."

Elaine laughs nervously. "I think _Japan_ heard the boss-lady."


	4. Chapter 4

A doctor never forgets the first patient they operate on. Steven Hollins is no exception.

Her name had been Darla Knox. Sixteen years old, not an inch over five feet tall, which he recalls only because she had been underweight even for her tiny stature. Appendicitis: an ailment as common as they come, yet no less dangerous than the fattest, juciest tumor. She'd been frightened, her pearly-blue eyes clouded and pained, and her brother needed to be pried off of her hospital bed so they could roll her through to the surgical ward. He'd turned his fear on Steven right then, distrust in his brow; seeing the soft babyfat around Steven's face and none of the pinched cynicism that hung about seasoned surgeons like a mist.

Darla had pulled through just fine. Years later, he only remembers because a doctor never forgets.

The real one that sticks is the first patient a doctor loses.

Warren Delaney. Some forty-year-old worker at the docks who started dipping into the wrong cargo. Gunshot wound to the chest, shattering his sternum, blowing bone fragments into his lungs like shrapnel. It had been a miracle he wasn't DOA, but no - naturally, the bastard had held on just long enough for Steven to empty a handful of fragments into a tray and start to think he had a fighting chance. Then his vitals trucked, and he was gone. Dr. Hollins had learned several lessons that day; for some reason, the one that stuck with him most was probably the most useless one.

On the table, a dead patient looks exactly the same as an alive one.

He's convinced that the turtle is dead when he enters the ward, scrubbed up and ready to go. It had taken too long to get here. The medical marvel that was the turtle reviving itself couldn't possibly have continued into every passing second in time.

But Mari looks up from a clamp and forceps, barking orders the second she sees Steven, and Rick is busy pulling the plunger back on a syringe that fills with clear liquid. The irregular beeping of a monitor breaks from the backdrop with enough startling force for Steven to remember what it actually means. For a moment, he's caught behind an observer's window, a bystander to the absurdity of it all: operating on a mangled turtle creature, in a private, underground facility, surrounded by coworkers he hasn't seen under more pressure than the ones that come with looming deadlines.

When kind, patient Dr. Mayers snaps at him to hurry, reality bears in with no less dizzying power. Behind him the others push through the doors, wearing scrubs and gloves, masks pulled over their faces, eyes shining with the same muted disbelief that Steven feels right now.

No one says anything. They get to work.

* * *

He loses track of time; at some point, all he registers is the blood frocked up his arms and torso and the distant understanding that it may be full of the same DNA he's been staring at for weeks. It would be exhilarating, if it felt real. None of it does yet.

What does feel real is the familiar rhythm of operating, even with all the wrenches thrown in from every angle imaginable. The temporary patch job they'd all employed at the scene had obviously not lasted to the table - only a few patches of taped-down gauze and cotton balls remained from their efforts, soaked through with red. Steven has no idea how something so small could have this much blood. It's barely bigger than Darla Knox had been. Five feet, an inch or two more. He's not exactly taking the time to measure it.

It needs a blood transfusion, but they don't have any. It needs something to plug that giant damn _hole_ in its shell, but they don't have anything other than gauze. So they do what they can. They sew it shut. Elaine steps outside to make a call. They pick shards out of the creature's ruined shell, bone clacking into trays like Warren Delaney's rib pieces, and pack the holes with enough gauze to nearly give it its shape back. Dr. Wilde appears out of nowhere with an honest-to-god _bone saw_ , and by some miracle, cutting open what's left of the chest plates doesn't finish it off.

On the inside, it looks startlingly human. Even more surprising is the fact that its organs, while severely damaged, aren't liquefied. They're intact enough to be recognizable, even, and there are quiet conversations across the table, exchanged in voices numbed by equal parts awe and exhaustion. As Steven works to stop the liver from drowning the pancreas in blood, something draws his eyes to Richard - to his sad doe-eyes that always make him look five years younger, focused with a glint of laser precision on the turtle's near-severed arm.

 _Poor bastard,_ Rick had said. _This thing was living_.

Steven's tired gaze falls to the creature again. To its organs, arranged in humanlike approximation; to its empty, quiet gaze, the intelligence mummified behind its swollen eyes. A tired, desperate understanding washes over him, and he wishes it hadn't.

The creature on the table before them is living. Not just alive - living.

And just like that, Steven Hollins understands that this patient, too, is one that he'll never forget. Larger than the romance of clearing an icon's blemished name, of modern equipment and insulated rooms, larger than the scientific discovery of a lifetime itself - is doing everything in his power to ensure that each patient is a Darla Knox, and none of them a Warren Delaney.

 _Why did I come here?_ He wonders suddenly, pointlessly.

Dr. Roys raises her voice over the frantic monitor, and Steven's existential crisis is pushed aside.

* * *

"Excellent work, Hollins! I knew you could save the beastie!" Abigail chirps, slapping him roughly on the back.

Steven doesn't have the mental or physical energy to be annoyed. He pushes his disheveled glasses back into place and huffs, trying to inject some life into his voice.

"We're not out of the woods yet, Dr. Finn. The turtle is... beyond critical. To be frank, I'm not sure how it still has a pulse right now."

"Don't you worry about it, love," Dr. Finn says dismissively. She takes a seat at her disaster of a desk, shuffles some papers around, then picks up a screwdriver and a strange piece of machinery small enough to fit in her palm. "He's a fighter, that beastie. Oh, I can't wait until he's all healed up! Just _think_ about what's in store for us!"

Steven cringes. "About that, Ma'am... we couldn't save the arm."

"What?" For the first time, displeasure seems to blot out Abigail's cheery disposition, and the smell of danger is instant. Steven rushes to explain, his tone deeply apologetic.

"The bone was severed. Tissue was turning necrotic. If we'd left it on, infection would have done him in." He swallows nervously. He isn't sure that she fully comprehends the fragility of their patient. "There's been damage to internal organs. The shell is... we have the bleeding under control for now, but for all we know he's paralyzed for life. Dr. Finn, it... it's not looking good."

She stares at him steadily over her glasses, her thick lips twisted in thought. Then, setting her tools down and folding her hands primly over her desk, Abigail leans forward.

"Come now, Hollins. Think outside the box! So you've got broken parts in your patient. You know what that means, don't you?"

Her voice is sweet and motherly, reminiscent of a kindergarten teacher speaking to her students, and Steven isn't sure whether to feel offended or just stupid. He looks askance, his tired brain fumbling to make sense of the question. 'Broken parts' is accurate enough, he supposes, but he doesn't understand what context she's aiming for.

"We have to fix them," he says, for lack of anything less obvious.

Abigail smirks wickedly and wags a huge finger. "Ah-ah! _Outside_ the box, Hollins! Why waste time fixing what you can just replace?"

Steven blinks. "Replace? You mean like... a transplant?"

"Bravo!" She laughs, clapping once. "I knew there was a reason I liked you!"

"But Dr. Finn, we have no donors. He may not even be compatible with humans! The time it would take to secure the organs, let alone figure out what constitutes a match -"

"For heaven's sake, don't get your knickers in a twist," she interrupts dourly. "Who says we need human donors? You don't _really_ think all of these metal toys are just for show, do you?"

Steven is quiet, uncomprehending of her logic. He waits for her to continue.

"I am _personally_ heading one of the laboratories on the bottom floor," Abigail says. "And starting tonight, you and your team are handing over every tissue sample you have from this turtle. I want cells from his eyeballs. I want his entire arm. If you didn't collect it during this surgery, get it during the next one. If he can't repair himself in a timely manner, we'll rebuild him from scratch!"

Finally, it dawns on Steven what his boss intends to do: clone body parts from the turtle himself and graft them into the whole, as if they're taking part in some Frankenstein re-imagining. The brilliant Abigail Finn, biologist and engineer, attempting to pioneer a science that incorporates both elements. He isn't sure whether it's genius or madness - maybe both, but _certainly_ there had been a better candidate for this research than a broken creature they'd found collapsed in a tunnel of their own making?

It's true that as a surgeon, Steven has assisted with transplants before. Come to think of it, he knows that Oscar Wilde specializes in it; the man never shuts up about the skills that saw him through multiple successful heart transplants. An uneasy quiver starts in his stomach. Yes, Dr. Finn may have handpicked them all, but... surely this was coincidence. Who on earth could predict a situation like this?

Abigail is smiling as she retrieves her palm-sized piece of machinery, and Steven loses all of his courage to ask differently. He rubs his neck, exhausted.

"Understood, Dr. Finn."

Something else is nagging at him still. The same jigsaw error that had felt out of place back in the tunnels. He skims through the conversation again, and it dawns on him; innocuous enough that even he doesn't see the harm in clarifying.

"Just one thing. We haven't actually determined its sex yet. We'll look into it during a future -"

To his surprise, Abigail Finn actually _starts_ at that. She slams the machinery piece down, screws and bolts rattling, and for a moment she looks as though a rug has been swept out from beneath her. But before Steven can even begin to backpedal, the look of panic subsides, and Abigail waves a dismissive hand.

"Right, of course! Silly me! I suppose I took one look at that those muscles and made away with it." She stands swiftly, turns around, and suddenly seems very busy with a stack of papers on her shelf. "Anyway, there's work to be done for the both of us! Send your assistant down with the samples right away, won't you? And then take a nap. You look awful!"

Recognizing the forceful dismissal even over his surprise, Steven clambers to his feet and nods. Bidding his boss a polite goodbye, he turns around and all but jogs out of the office. The door clicks shut with a metallic shudder behind him.

If he looks awful, he feels worse. He knows he'll have to digest this rollercoaster of a day sooner rather than later, but his feet automatically carry him off to the lab, his exhausted brain trying to resist the new barrage of questions his conversation with Abigail Finn have just raised.

How are they supposed to save this poor creature? Why is she so insistent on doing it her way? What, exactly, have all of them just signed up for?

And when did she stop in the ICU to actually get a look at the turtle?


End file.
